Did You Know? Being Bilingual Makes You Smarter

If you grew up in Malaysia switching between Bahasa Malaysia and English (and maybe Mandarin, Tamil, or Hokkien too), you were doing something every day that researchers have spent forty years arguing about.

The claim is called the "bilingual advantage." Managing two languages means constantly selecting one and suppressing the other — when you speak English, the Malay word for what you're describing is also active in your head, and something has to hold it back. The theory is that decades of this exercises the brain's executive functions: attention, task-switching, and inhibitory control, the same machinery you use to stay on a task while notifications pile up.

Here's the part most articles on this topic leave out. The evidence is genuinely mixed. Early studies found clear advantages on tests of attention and switching, and the finding spread fast because it's an appealing story. Larger replication attempts since have often found much weaker effects, or none, and reviews have pointed out that studies finding an advantage were more likely to get published than those finding nothing. The honest summary is that if a bilingual advantage in executive function exists, it's smaller and more situational than the headlines of a decade ago suggested.

So why write about it at all? Because the weaker version of the claim is still interesting, and because two related findings have held up better.

The first is about ageing. Observational studies across several countries have found that bilingual people tend to show symptoms of dementia around four to five years later than monolingual people with similar education and background. The disease itself doesn't progress differently — the current explanation is cognitive reserve, the idea that a brain with more practised routes through it copes longer before damage becomes visible as symptoms. This is correlational work, so it can't prove that the languages caused the delay, but the pattern has appeared repeatedly.

The second is more immediately useful to parents, and it's the myth worth killing. Raising a child with two or three languages does not cause language delay, and code-switching is not a sign of confusion. Malaysian parents worry about "rojak" speech — a sentence that starts in Malay and finishes in English — as though it means the child has mastered neither. It doesn't. Fluent code-switching follows the grammatical rules of both languages, which is why it's difficult to do badly on purpose, and it's a marker of competence rather than a deficit.

What is true is that bilingual children often know slightly fewer words in each individual language than a monolingual child of the same age, while knowing more words in total. That gap in any single language typically closes with schooling, and the total was always larger. Knowing this in advance saves a lot of unnecessary worry when a teacher mentions vocabulary.

None of this makes Malaysia's multilingualism a superpower, exactly. But it does make it an asset that most of the country holds without noticing, and the practical advice that follows is simple: keep both languages in active use rather than letting one become the language you only understand.

That's the gap most people have. Understanding a language always outruns producing it — you can follow a conversation in BM long before you can comfortably lead one. Closing that gap takes retrieval: being asked, and having to come up with the word yourself, rather than nodding along.

CerdikCerdik is built around that. The whole site runs in English and Bahasa Malaysia one tap apart, and Word Match at cerdikcerdik.com/games/word-match drills the recognition step directly. If you want a demonstration of language interference you can actually feel, try Color Match at cerdikcerdik.com/games/color-match in each language and notice which one trips you up more — for most people it's whichever they read most fluently.

The Daily Quiz runs in English to keep things quick and focused — perfect for a fast daily brain workout alongside your language practice. Start your streak today at cerdikcerdik.com/quiz.